THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR

THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR; Mention of Daughter's Rape Is Generating Its Own Tempest

By B. DRUMMOND AYRES Jr.,

Published: October 20, 1994

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 19—
As sound bites from campaign debates go, it was not in the same political league with Lloyd Bentsen's withering riposte that Dan Quayle was "no John Kennedy." Nor was it in the same class as Ronald Reagan's patronizing comment to Jimmy Carter, "There you go again."

Nevertheless, State Treasurer Kathleen Brown delivered a debate sound bite to remember -- and one that is now the subject of hot debate -- when midway through a televised face-off with Gov. Pete Wilson last Friday she demanded that he stop questioning her commitment to be tough on criminals and then delivered an emotional, personal revelation about crime.

"You cannot possibly imagine what it's like to be a woman at night, worrying about your safety," she told the Governor, fixing him with a steely glare. "And you cannot imagine what it's like to be a mother, waiting at home late at night for your kids to come home -- waiting for your daughter to come home in the evening and having her come home and comfort her because she's been raped. Or your son, who calls coming home from school, when I'm working, to say, 'Come home because I've been robbed and I've been mugged.' You can't understand that, so don't question my commitment to be tough on crime."

The Governor, a moderate Republican who has made the crime issue a mainstay of his re-election campaign and has frequently questioned the "courage" of his more liberal Democratic opponent to confront the issue, seemed momentarily caught off guard by Ms. Brown's emotional revelation. But he quickly recovered, apparently sensing that while he had been pummeled a bit, there might still be opportunity at hand.

"A moving performance," he said sarcastically when she finished.

Since then, the debate over Ms. Brown's remarks has centered not just on whether she stung the Governor politically and picked up some badly needed momentum for her flagging campaign but also on whether she calculatedly went after the crucial women's vote with some blatant political grandstanding that risked exposing a daughter to unwanted publicity.

"Whatever Kathleen Brown actually planned or intended," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at the Claremont Graduate School who specializes in California elections, "the reality is that the motive behind this rather striking moment in a debate has become at least as much of an issue, if not more of an issue, than the message she was trying to deliver."

Ms. Brown contended on Tuesday at a news conference that she "spoke from the heart" on Friday night when she disclosed that one of her two daughters, Sascha Rice, 25, had been the victim of a date rape while in college and that her son, Zebediah Rice, 23, had been robbed while in high school.

She also said that her daughter was "totally supportive" of the debate disclosure, having previously talked at least three times with the family about whether the rape was something that might come to light or ought to be brought up in a campaign centered so much on the crime issue.

But in no way, Ms. Brown insisted, did she intend during the debate for her mention of the rape and the robbery, as well as her own fears, to become a politically exploitative bombshell.

"The point is that the incumbent Governor is so out of touch," she said.

Over the weekend, Mr. Wilson toned down his "moving performance" quip a bit, expressing "sympathy" for the Brown family. But he nevertheless continued to argue that the appropriateness of injecting personal pain into a political campaign "depends on how it's done."

Neither incident involving Ms. Brown's children was reported to the police, said John Whitehurst, her press secretary. In fact, Mr. Whitehurst said, Ms. Brown did not learn of the rape herself until a few years after it occurred and thus in the debate was not literally describing what had happened but instead was "drawing from the strength and emotion of the experience."